UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

KIM BROWN: Do you think about the situation in Palestine could be described in something different than apartheid? Or, even something further than apartheid? I mean, are we witnessing a sort of political, and actual genocide of the Palestinian people?

The question about genocide– yes, it’s an incremental genocide. And I think that’s a word that gives a lot of people pause and it certainly should. We don’t see the absolutely mass slaughters, although in Gaza I think we’ve seen something very much like it that we usually associate with genocide. But– the attempts to erase a people, to just erase them, to erase their history, I think follow a logic that can only be called genocidal. I mean, every time someone says– and people say it all the time, I get it on twitter all the time– “There’s no such thing as a Palestinian,” or “There was nobody there when the Zionists arrived”– these are genocidal statements, these are attempts to erase a culture, erase a history, decimate a people and I think they should be recognized as that.

Starvation, unemployment, the denial of basic human rights, there’s been denial of basic water resources for the people of Gaza. The long term blockade- over ten years- of Gaza, is just, in my opinion, part of a genocidal campaign. And by that I mean genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, committed by Israel and the United States.

On October 7-8, 2016, an important conference was held in Vancouver BC entitled “Genocide: The Politics of Denial, Forgetting and the Work of Memory”. One of the plenary sessions at this conference featured Sid Shniad and Hanna Kawas detailing the long history of Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people. The session highlighted historical and current examples of how the Palestinian people have been and are still being targeted, as well as the complicity of the Canadian state in this dispossession. Both speakers concluded with a call to support the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions BDS movement.

“I think it’s important to also make a point that if we take a look at the United Nations definition of genocide and if we take a look at Israeli policies over the last 70 years in Palestine, the similarities are striking. It is almost point for point. We’re talking about how and why this is happening, why there is a call to boycott Israel and why the BDS movement is making so much sense because something has to be done on a worldwide scale.”

“There’s never been a tank, or a war plane, or indeed an army in Gaza. There is no threat, there never has been and everybody knows that. Anybody who’s informed knows that. The idea that somehow the Israeli massacre of people in Gaza, which is by the way nothing new, Israel has been massacring people in Gaza since the early 1950’s, when Israel created the Gaza strip. There’s never been a threat. It is n ongoing massacre. I think using the word ‘genocide’ isn’t too extreme here either. It has nothing to do with self-defence. It has to do with the desire to kill the people in Gaza, to destroy them and then blame them for the violence because it’s the easiest thing to do.”

“The US is addicted to war in the same way heroin addicts are unhappily addicted to opiates, typically as a result of some spiritual ailment which they suffer. If the US was a person, those who care would organize an intervention with the aim of putting it through a detoxification and subsequent counseling program. But since we are stuck with the status quo, Americans need to understand that in the same way drug addicts are eventually held to account for the crimes they are compelled by their addiction to commit. The United States will certainly be held to account for its crimes in aiding and abetting Israel’s slow genocide on Palestinians.”